One month

Hot off the scale, Alice's one-month stats:

10 lbs. 8 oz.
22 inches

And Edith has been right in telling us the baby's head looks bigger these days: it's half an inch larger around than at birth.

Alice also received the ultimate acknowledgment of legitimate American identity today, a social security number, so I guess she's now officially here to stay.

Unfortunately, the social security number arrived in the mail at noon, 40 minutes after we got home from the pediatrician's office. The staff at the office had told us that Alice was no longer insured on my health care plan as of yesterday, thirty days after her birth. I said that my HR department assured me we had 90 days to enroll her but that we needed a social security number to do so, so we'd been waiting on the social security number. The pediatrician said no, the social security number was irrelevant and that we'd had just 30 days, now expired. I called HR and they said we indeed had 90 days and that they could put retroactive coverage through immediately after I hit "submit" on the online form, but that the baby needed a social security number.

The end result was that we paid for the visit out-of-pocket and will now attempt to get reimbursed. If we'd had a 3pm pediatrician's appointment, or if Alice had been born in a month with 30 days, all the chips would have fallen in the right order and it would have been painless. Love bureaucracy. (Next battle: Figuring out how on earth the hospital calculated $1,217 in uncovered "non-medical incidentals" during our two-day stay. We've been racking our brains, and all we can figure is that they were using solid-gold diapers in the nursery.)

In sunnier news, Alice continues to thrive. Distinguishing characteristics include her long fingers and her pixie-like pointed ears. She is flashing her first smiles, most often at Daddy, with Edith a close second. She is also quite fond of the third shelf on the bookshelf in her room and of lying on her changing table, which seems to be the magic spot.

Along with the onset this week of a classic case of nighttime fussies, a.k.a. colic--which is still ever so much milder than Edith's non-stop 5-8pm hollering at this age--she developed a raging case of baby acne last Saturday, right on schedule. Face, scalp, ears, neck, shoulders. A blow to any parent's vanity, but she's doing fine with it.

It didn't stop her from making her Manhattan debut, accompanying mom to job interviews in the city with dad along as baby handler (and wonderful moral support). Alice's first hotel stay, right in the heart of Times Square, included a fabulous 42nd-story view of the Empire State Building and lower Manhattan--though she seemed just as enthralled with the window curtain. She didn't take in any shows, but she braved the crush of tourists and shmoozed with a new baby friend at Starbucks...and with historians aplenty in the conference hotels. We hadn't thought to bring the camera along for a day of interviewing but had we done so, we could have documented her first New York adventure by snapping her picture with Elmo in front of the Ticketmaster booth. At one month old she has been to four states.

She also has been meeting many relatives and friends, including my students when she made an appearance yesterday at the end of our last class of the semester. The students surprised me with a lovely card and Alice's first Princeton outfit. I'm sorry to say, it comes before any Yale, Cornell, Carolina, Tufts, PTS, or Wisconsin gear...so we'll have to do some quick work to balance the Tiger influence.

Pictures soon.